An Overview of ALIA4J: An Execution Model for Advanced-Dispatching Languages

Christoph Bockisch; Andreas Sewe; Mira Mezini; Mehmet Aksit

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_11

An Overview of ALIA4J: An Execution Model for Advanced-Dispatching Languages

Christoph Bockisch, Andreas Sewe, Mira Mezini, Mehmet Aksit

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

348 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

New programming languages that allow to reduce the complexity of software solutions are frequently developed, often as extensions of existing languages. Many implementations thus resort to transforming the extension’s source code to the imperative intermediate representation of the parent language. But approaches like compiler frameworks only allow for re-use of code transformations for syntactically-related languages; they do not allow for re-use across language families. In this paper, we present the ALIA4J approach to bring such re-use to language families with advanced dispatching mechanisms like pointcut-advice or predicate dispatching. ALIA4J introduces a meta-model of dispatching as a rich, extensible intermediate language. By implementing language constructs from four languages as refinements of this meta-model, we show that a significant amount of them can be re-used across language families. Another building block of ALIA4J is a framework for execution environments that automatically derives an execution model of the program’s dispatching from representations in our intermediate language. This model enables different execution strategies for dispatching; we have validated this by implementing three execution environments whose strategies range from interpretation to optimizing code generation.

Original language	Undefined
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS Europe 2011)
Editors	Judith Bishop, Antonio Vallecillo
Place of Publication	Berlin
Publisher	Springer
Pages	131-146
Number of pages	16
ISBN (Print)	978-3-642-21951-1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_11
Publication status	Published - Jun 2011
Event	49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns, TOOLS 2011 - Zurich, Switzerland Duration: 28 Jun 2011 → 30 Jun 2011

Publication series

Name	Lecture Notes In Computer Science
Publisher	Springer Verlag
Volume	6705
ISSN (Print)	0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)	1611-3349

Conference

Conference	49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns, TOOLS 2011
Period	28/06/11 → 30/06/11
Other	28-30 June 2011

Keywords

METIS-286286
Aspect Oriented Programming
Advanced dispatching
language implementation
CR-D.3
EWI-21621
predicate dispatching
IR-79900

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_11

Cite this

Bockisch, C., Sewe, A., Mezini, M., & Aksit, M. (2011). An Overview of ALIA4J: An Execution Model for Advanced-Dispatching Languages. In J. Bishop, & A. Vallecillo (Eds.), Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS Europe 2011) (pp. 131-146). (Lecture Notes In Computer Science; Vol. 6705). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_11

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Bockisch, C, Sewe, A, Mezini, M & Aksit, M 2011, An Overview of ALIA4J: An Execution Model for Advanced-Dispatching Languages. in J Bishop & A Vallecillo (eds), Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS Europe 2011). Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 6705, Springer, Berlin, pp. 131-146, 49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns, TOOLS 2011, 28/06/11. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_11

An Overview of ALIA4J: An Execution Model for Advanced-Dispatching Languages. / Bockisch, Christoph; Sewe, Andreas; Mezini, Mira et al.
Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS Europe 2011). ed. / Judith Bishop; Antonio Vallecillo. Berlin: Springer, 2011. p. 131-146 (Lecture Notes In Computer Science; Vol. 6705).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

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Bockisch C, Sewe A, Mezini M, Aksit M. An Overview of ALIA4J: An Execution Model for Advanced-Dispatching Languages. In Bishop J, Vallecillo A, editors, Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS Europe 2011). Berlin: Springer. 2011. p. 131-146. (Lecture Notes In Computer Science). doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-21952-8_11